Keynote Speakers

Andrea Mennicken is Professor of Management and Organisation in the department of Public Services Management and Organisation (PSMO) at King's Business School. Her research focuses on public-sector organisation and reform, with particular emphasis on accounting reforms, failure regimes, risk management and regulation, as well as the processes of marketisation, valuation and quantification.

Andrea teaches the Master's module on Risk and Crisis Management in Organisations and Society and is a supervisor on the undergraduate Capstone course at King's Business School. Her work primarily draws on qualitative methods — semi-structured interviews, document analysis and observation — and she has conducted research in prisons, hospitals, social-care organisations, universities and accounting firms. Since February 2025 she has been leading an ESRC-funded international research project investigating changes in research evaluation practices through metadata in the digital age.

She has published in leading accounting, management and social-science journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, Foucault Studies, KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Organization Studies and Sociologie du Travail. With Robert Salais she co-edited the volume The New Politics of Numbers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and she also co-edited Thinking Infrastructures (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 62, Emerald, 2019).

Since 2024 Andrea has served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Accounting, Organizations and Society. She is also a member of the Executive Council of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). Previously she was Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she co-directed the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR). Andrea holds a PhD in Accounting from the LSE, an MSc in Sociology from the LSE, and a Diplom in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld (Germany).

Cristina Valdiosera is a biologist trained at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and holds a PhD from the Complutense University of Madrid, specialising in archaeogenomics. Since 2020 she has been a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the University of Burgos, and since 2025 she is also affiliated with the National Research Centre on Human Evolution (CENIEH).

She currently leads the UBU–CENIEH Transversal Group on Molecular Archaeology and is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced project AdMEXture, which uses bioarchaeological and genomic tools to investigate the process of admixture that followed the encounter between the populations of Mexico and Spain five centuries ago.

Her research lines also include prehistoric and historical migrations in the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, with notable contributions to the study of the Neolithisation of the Iberian Peninsula and Africa, and the peopling of the Americas.

Joan Martinez-Alier is an Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and a senior researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, between 1963 and 1973 and again in 1984–85, and has edited the journal Ecología Política in Barcelona since 1990.

His publications are numerous and include Ecological economics: energy, environment, and society (1987); Varieties of environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997, with Ramachandra Guha); and The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2003). He co-edited the textbook Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (2013), an output of the collaborative project CEECEC (2008–2010), which was followed by EJOLT (2011–15) — Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade — involving 23 academic and activist partners. He is co-director of the Atlas of Environmental Justice, which now contains more than 4,500 entries.

He served as president of the International Society for Ecological Economics in 2006 and 2007. In 2016 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project EnvJustice. A leading scholar in ecological economics, political ecology and environmental justice, he received the Balzan Prize in 2020 and the Holberg Prize in 2023.

In 2023 a Festschrift was edited with contributions from colleagues and former students — The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology — alongside his own book Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice, which describes and analyses hundreds of "ecological distribution conflicts" and the "valuation languages" mobilised by activists. The book reveals the enormous "entropy hole" at the centre of the industrial economy and focuses on geographies of resistance at the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal, and on the intersectional protagonists of a world counter-movement for environmental justice.

In 2025–26 he has co-authored articles based on the EJAtlas on the political ecology of extractivist firms such as TotalEnergies, Zijin and Glencore — of particular interest to scholars and students in business schools.